After Baldur’s Gate III dominated so much of gaming discussion last year, it does feel like most upcoming fantasy RPGs are being compared to it at least in part. That’s certainly the case for Avowed, and during a recent interview with Windows Central, creative director Carrie Patel spoke about the decision to cut any multiplayer features from Avowed.
“What’s important to us is making sure we have a really solid campaign and [critical] path story that puts the player in this meaningful role as the character moving things forward, making impactful decisions, and really shaping the world and the characters around them,” she said, adding that all of that becomes much more complex with a multiplayer component.
“It’s not that any of these challenges are unsolvable, the Larian Studios team built an incredible RPG with Baldur’s Gate 3, and they’ve had years of experience with Divinity: Original Sin, working at building multiplayer within a really robust RPG framework. It’s a very hard thing to do well, and we wanted to make sure that first and foremost, we were delivering on the things that players come to an Obsidian Entertainment RPG expecting, which is a really well-developed story, meaningful choices and consequences, and the ability to be the agent of change in the world.”
Obsidian isn’t going to go out of their way to try something fans don’t know them for, then, which sounds like a good thing, especially after years of studios going for something entirely new just to have it backfire. Looking at you, Rocksteady.